A new documentary on Ladislas Starevich shows how his hinged wooden puppets were made to perform

Stop Motion Magazine released a short documentary, "Ladislas Starevich: Making Figures Come Alive", on its YouTube channel on 8 November 2026, with an illustrated companion article. It is not a full biography. The film asks how Starevich made puppets seem to notice, want and react through small physical actions such as a pause or a turn. Starevich was born Władysław Starewicz in Moscow in 1882, grew up in Kaunas, left Russia in 1919 and settled in France in 1920.

The film moves through The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), with its cast of insects, and Fétiche mascotte (1933), in which a small dog goes looking for an orange for a sick child. It also covers The Tale of the Fox, animated over about eighteen months in 1929–30 and released commercially in Germany in 1937 and in France in 1941. Irène Starevich shares the direction, screenplay and animation credits on that film with her father. On screen are surviving objects, including an articulated wooden hand with jointed fingers and a puppet from La Cigale with wire exposed at its joints. The magazine points out that the prepared beetles seen in the film are a later reconstruction, not original specimens.

For construction, the article draws on Starevich's own 1946 description of his "ciné-marionnettes", reproduced in Thomas Beaufils's conservation study in the journal Déméter (2021). The body was a light wooden figure with hinges, with muscles shaped in cotton and hands and limbs covered in chamois leather. The fingers were lead wire moulded over with cotton, and the carved head had a hinged jaw. Fine pins in the feet held the puppet to a wooden or cork base. Beaufils also records the sizes Starevich gave: about 35 cm for medium shots, 5–10 cm for crowds in distant shots, and occasionally life-size for close-ups. The magazine cautions that one written account does not prove every puppet used the same mechanism. The Wiki's Armature page sets this hinged-wood-and-lead-wire system alongside today's wire and ball-and-socket skeletons.